Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything - Softcover

Ms. Ehrenreich's own story (she was born in 1941) involves growing up in Montana, New England and finally Los Angeles, where, as a teenager, she fell into the city's Beat scene. She attended Reed College in Oregon, where she nearly married a brilliant math student she describes as "James Dean rolled up with Isaac Asimov, an aristocrat in jeans and a denim jacket, the owner of the fastest motorcycle on campus." This fellow was later convicted of trying to murder the woman he did marry. She received a Ph.D. in cellular immunology, and she had a political awakening during the early years of the Vietnam War. She gradually turned into the hardy soul we know today: a nonconformist writer and thinker with a vivifying sense of social justice, apparent in her many books, including the best-selling "Nickel and Dimed" (2001). Ms. Ehrenreich is a person worth knowing, and "Living With a Wild God" gets us as close as we are likely to get. But this discursive and repetitive and claustrophobic book is more fully about the mystical experiences she began having as a young girl, experiences she has long been wary of speaking about, perhaps with reason. "Try inserting an account of a mystical experience into a conversation, and you'll likely get the same response as you would if you confided that you had been the victim of an alien abduction," she says. One of these reverberating experiences occurred in her early teens at a horse show in Massachusetts. "Something peeled off the visible world," Ms. Ehrenreich recalls, "taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels and words. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, that's what I would have said I was doing, but the word 'tree' was gone, along with all the notions of tree-ness that had accumulated in the last dozen or so years since I had acquired language."